As in sports, fouls now just part of the winning strategy in politics

First, there was Mitt Romney airing an ad recently in which he falsely attributes something then-candidate Barack Obama said in 2008 as the candidate’s own belief. The quote: “if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” Obama indeed said it but was quoting a John McCain strategist talking about his own candidate’s campaign.

Now, we have someone who obviously favors Ron Paul buying up the rickperry.com domain name and using it to solicit money for the Paul campaign. Rick Perry’s campaign is actually on rickperry.org.

I’m imagining campaign aides or surrogates brainstorming over pizza and beers, thinking this stuff up and chortling over their creativity. But this is just frat boy stuff. Worse, it amounts to lies and misrepresentation.

It should disqualify a candidate. Instead, it has somehow become OK.

Thomas Edsall, in the New York Times, reported an anonymous Romney “operative” defending the lying ad by arguing that it’s all propaganda and therefore acceptable in political campaigning.

No, it’s called lying.

The operatives who pulled these stunts and those they work for must have known that they’d get caught. But they obviously reasoned that the electorate would rather believe something they’d like to be true than the truth and that they’d be forgiving of flim-flammery as long as it favors their guy. They reasoned that the rest of us would chortle right along with them, wowed by how so very clever they are.

We used to call these “dirty tricks,” a phrase the partially explains why Richard Nixon is now held in such disrepute. Now, in much the same way we applaud deliberate fouling in sports as just another credible strategy for winning, we either don’t care or look the other way.

In this way we demonstrate not only how inured we have become but our acceptance. And that makes us culpable.